Sabina Ott

Sabina Ott is an American painter, sculptor, installation and video artist known for her broad range of work and her central role in the art world as a teacher, administrator, and recently the founder of the exhibition space "Terrain" which invites artist to create installations and performances using the exterior of her Oak Park, Illinois home.

Ott was deeply inspired by Gertrude Stein, an American writer of novels, poetry, and plays. Raised in Oakland, California, Stein is a literary innovator and pioneer of modernest literature and also a collector of modernist art.

Ott was also inspired by the many places she traveled. Exhibiting since 1985, Ott has participated in over 100 solo and group exhibitions at institutions in Brazil, New Zealand, Australia, and many cities across the US. Her work is in numerous museum collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Oakland Museum of Art.

·            What are the artist’s central ideas / concerns?

o   “Everywhere there is somewhere”

o   Printing creating a “lyrical storyline”

o   Using and layering bold color palettes

·            What inspires this artist?

o   BOLD Color fields, contrast, letters, pattern

o   Rose motifs

o   Grid lines

o   The writings of Gertrude Stein

o   “Ott has created a series of visual notations evoking a since of play that repeats and repeats.”

·            What is the source material behind this work?

o   Ott merged intricate pictorial imagery

§  Children’s drawings

§  Color polaroid’s

§  Rose motifs with specific text to create a “suite of richly worked monotypes.”

Attracted Meadow Meadows, 1996

  

Left For Them in a Place, 1997

Like To Have Grammer, 1997

A Villa Of Lilacs Is Not Magenta, 1997

“here and there pink melon joy” 2014-- styrofoam, mirror, water, pump, live and artificial plants canvas, light fixtures, spray foam and paint, plexiglass, clock

Ikeda Manabu

Ikeda Manabu Ikeda received critical attention from American audiences following his participation in the exhibition Bye Bye Kitty!!! Between Heaven and Hell in Contemporary Japanese Art, at the Japan Society in New York City in 2011. Holland Carter, writing for the New York Times commented: “For obsessive detailing, nothing tops Manabu Ikeda’s miniaturist ink landscapes and cityscapes. In Existence he presents the world as a giant, decomposing tree. In History of Rise and Fall, it becomes a shifting, clattering architectural
pileup: a million-roofed Samurai castle garnished with cherry trees, fragmented Buddhist sculptures
and ant-size hanged human figures.”

Italo Scanga

West coast artist, Italo Scanga, came to America from Italy in 1997, at age 15, with his family. He has taught art at the University of California, San Diego, since 1978, and has been a frequent artist-in-residence and teacher at Pilchuck, the art-glass school in Stanwood, Washington.

Personally I am very good friends with the scanga family. 

I got to talk to italos son and he told me a lot about his opinions on his father's work 

 Italo Scanga works as an artist in many mediums. Like Scanga's personal origins, his works of art show the many languages a single artist may use. One doesn't ordinarily think of lithographs as "talking," but you can see it in Italo Scanga graphics.  Italo scangas work can only be described as "watered by an excitable temperament that ricochets from the literal to the metaphysical." italos scangas son that i talked to says that italos work always "go to extremes to engage the viewer." Italo scangas experiments with many mediums of art, but he makes his 2d work seems very 3d and real but at the same time still fictional and unreal.

Pia Fries

I chose Pia because I was interested in abstract art. At first glance you can’t tell what the print, painting, etc is depicting. I also really enjoyed the way she played with colors and textures. Each part of the art piece is a different color, but somehow it all works as one. The way she uses the silkscreened process and collage in her flat prints is also really cool to look at. She does a really good job of playing with dimension, textures, and colors.

Born: October 6, 1955

From Beromunster, Switzerland

Studied sculpture in Lucerne in 1980

Studied painting under Gerhard Richter in 1986

Abstract and photorealistic paintings as well as photographs and glass pieces

Artist at Crown Point Press

Works in Germany

All work is very abstract

doesn't use previous teacher, Gerhard Richter’s, theory of painting —> uses belief that “you can do it today”

Richter was an abstract painter —> likes to find different ways to interpret reality

A painter

Paintings have a lot of sculptural influence

Uses a lot of oil paint

Uses photographed and silkscreened elements

Silkscreened: process in which mesh is used to transfer ink

Exhibitions can be found all over the world: France, New York, California, Germany, etc.

Inspired by Maria Sybilla Merian

Merian engraved plants, animals, and insects

Pia was inspired and remade the engravings using the silkscreened method and collage.

Elaine de Kooning

Elaine de Kooning was born in Brooklyn. She studied at the Leonardo Da Vinci art school in New York City as well as the American Artists School and Black Mountain College. She was inspired by her teachers, Stuart Davis and Raphael Soyer, as well as her husband, who gave her drawing lessons and sold her first watercolor. She experimented with painting, etching and sculpture, and her work is a mixture of abstraction and realism, giving the art a very unique, raw feel. She loved to travel, which greatly inspired her artwork. She tended to draw on one particular theme for a long period of time, for example, her most prominent themes included a bull inspired by a trip to the Southwest, a statue from the Luxembourg gardens in Paris, and wildlife cave drawings from France and Spain. De Kooning also had a strong political voice, becoming a member of the Young Communist League at the American Artists School and the John Reed Club. Elaine and her husband Willem de Kooning both suffered from alcoholism, a struggle for which Elaine undoubtedly found an outlet in her artwork. 

Richard Diebenkorn

     Richard Diebenkorn was born in Portland OR in 1922, and grew up in San Francisco. He attended Stanford, then was in the Marine Corps. After leaving the Marines he enrolled at the California School of Fine Art. Diebenkorn moved to Albuquerque, and flew a low altitude plane between New Mexico and California, from which he viewed landscapes from above. He started producing prints with Crown Point Press in 1962. Diebenkorn died in 1993 at the age of seventy-one. 

    Diebenkorn’s abstract works use a lot of grids in them, sometimes loosely, but always seem present. He seems influenced by aerial views of divided land from above. He did a lot of iterative works, such as his 140 paintings that comprised the Ocean Park Series.  I especially like Window and Construct for their grids that intersect with fluid objects.

        "I'm really a traditional painter, not avant-garde at all. I wanted to follow a tradition and extend it."                                                                                                                                                                              — Richard Diebenkorn

Construct

Window

Folsom Street Variations 

Ocean Park no. 54

Untitled (Albuquerque)

Large Bright Blue